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The Kingdom of the Frozen Dead
South of the World's Edge Mountains lies the domain once known as Sjornia, ancestral home to the humans now known as the Warriors of the Broken Tribes. South of that land in the frozen seas, there floated a massive iceberg known as the Isle of the Frozen Dead. After the resurgence of dragons during the period known as the Second Dragon War, a flight of gold dragons flew south of Ceilar and obliterated the iceberg, sinking it into the sea and, they thought, ridding the world of that roaming, undead plague. Unfortunately, the surviving skeletons and zombies of the island sank with their iceberg and found themselves wandering the bottom of the sea. After a matter of weeks, they heard a mysterious call, pulling them to the north. They reached land in the fjords of Sjornia and, under the command of the recently reborn Loran Morvaine, the Lich King. The barbarians fought valiantly, but for every loss on their side, the forces of the Lich King grew stronger. Eventually, the Sjornian people were overrun and forced to flee into the mountains of the north to seek shelter from the undead hordes. Eventually, they found their way into Wilder where they were reborn as the Warriors of the Broken Tribes. Their frozen homeland, however, had become the domainion of dark magic, and remains so today. So powerful are the necromantic energies of the place, that a corpse left to lie for too long may rise of its own accord to seek out its new master and join the armies of the undead. Even white dragons are not immune to this effect, and such creatures have taken to freezing their own kind into cavernous tombs to spare them that fate. For centuries, the Lich King was a very real threat to the north, warring on Wilder Kæryn, his servants even working to extend his reach as far north as Seawn. During the fallen archangel Az's war on the gods, the Lich King even dared to strike against Qord himself, trying to destroy the god of the undead's power. He succeeded in killing Qord, but the god used his last breath to scatter his godspark and disperse the majority of that power across the Shadowfell to rob Morvaine of his prize. Refusing to be thwarted, the Lich King abandoned both his physical body and the mortal realm to search of Qord's godspark in the Shadowfell. While many of Morvaine's lieutenants had been slain by mortal heroes while he was battling Qord, those that remained saw a power vacuum that needed to be filled in their lord's absence. For over a century, these powerful undead fought against one another for control of the frozen lands south of the World's Edge. In the end, it was not one of the Lich King's lieutenants that sat upon the Frozen Throne. Through false alliances and force of arms, it was the first and immortal Death Knight, Lady Jhezra, who brought the former agents of the Lich King into line and took control of the Kingdom of the Frozen Dead, the land's new Undying Queen. The only living humans south of the mountains reside in a Kæri fortress on the far western shore of what was once Sjornia, as far as can be from the Frozen Citadel. From that fortress, a large force of paladins, clerics, and warriors strike out in small crusades, trying to cleanse the land and perhaps, eventually, challenge the Undying Queen herself.Category:Locations Category:Gazeteer